A woman married to the brutal and infertile owner of a dye mill in rural China conceives a boy with her husband's nephew but is forced to raise her son as her husband's heir without revealing his parentage in this circular tragedy. Filmed in glowing technicolour, this tale of romantic and familial love in the face of unbreakable tradition is more universal than its setting.

Xinghua lives with her husband, who makes money by selling stones from the Great Wall. But she is unable to give him a son to inherit this wealth. When her husband hatches a plan to tear down the local historic fortress to find a legendary hidden treasure, she finds herself drawn to a gentler, more educated man who wants to preserve it.

Set against the backdrop of the Boxer Rebellion and the takeover of the Forbidden City by foreign powers, the empress-dowager Cixi and her notorious chief eunuch fight a losing battle to preserve their corrupt and autocratic regime.

A fiction about the founder Mingquan Yang, and the early ages of Quanjude Restaurant, the most famous Peking duck restaurant. Yang bought the Dejuquan restaurant and changed the name to Quanjude according to a fortune teller, hired cooks from the Forbidden City, and invented a special recipe of roasted duck.

An old teahouse in Beijing serves as the stage for a drama that unfolds over several tumultuous decades of modern Chinese history, from the waning days of the Qing dynasty to the eve of the People's Republic.

A married village worker teams up with an old girlfriend to try to dig a well for his water-starved village. The well collapses and they are trapped. Their enforced confinement leads to them exploring their feelings for each other and those around them.